Abstracts
Ten points down for snoring: Intellectual deficits in children with problems breathing during sleep
Mark Kohler
PhD student, School of Psychology, University of South Australia
Supervised through Centre for Sleep Research University of South Australia, Pulmonary Medicine, CYWHS
Sleep Disordered Breathing, or SDB, are problems with breathing during sleep and are very common, affecting at least 10% of children, or an estimated quarter of a million children in Australia. There is strong evidence that SDB, regardless of how severe, causes deficits in a wide range of daytime intellectual functions, including IQ, learning and memory. However, whether treatment to improve breathing in SDB can also improve the deficits in these intellectual abilities is still unknown.
Therefore, we recently completed a comparison of intellectual abilities in 53 children with SDB aged between 3-12 years, and a comparable group of 51 healthy children who did not snore. Both groups were studied again 6 months later, after the children with suspected SDB had been treated by removal of their tonsils and adenoids - the standard treatment to alleviate SDB in children.
As in previous studies, we found that many intellectual abilities in children with SDB were significantly reduced prior to surgery, compared to the healthy children. Specifically, children with SDB obtained an IQ score that was on average 10 points lower than healthy children and they also were more deficient in general knowledge, attention, planning, problem solving, language skills and memory. To our great surprise however, while surgery improved breathing during sleep in children with SDB, significant problems were still evident in intelligence, memory, reasoning and language development. These results suggest that early intervention for childhood SDB may be critical to prevent long term problems in daytime intellectual functioning.
